


Getting it out in the open

by imsfire



Series: Cassian week 2018 prompts [4]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Cassian is not good at feelings, Communication, F/M, Feels, but they are working on it, neither is Jyn, reassurance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 15:19:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15439950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: Neither Cassian nor Jyn is good at talking about their feelings, but sometimes it's good to have a go at it anyway.





	Getting it out in the open

**Author's Note:**

> For day four of Cassian Appreciation week on tumblr: prompt, Silence.  
> The connection to the prompt is a bit tenuous, to be honest, as this is more about the decision that speech is better than silence!

Sometimes he cannot understand the way Jyn’s heart works.  It’s almost as if she refuses to feel.  Or to see things.  Say things.

He knows she’s struggled with trust, struggled and demanded it be given her first, before she grants it.  It's been like that ever since the day they met.  He knows it rationally, but surely now?  There's real love here, of that he's certain.  Yet still sometimes Jyn brushes off the strongest words of his heart.  As if they sting; as if they frighten her. 

Is it simply emotional programming?  Is it a conscious refusal?  Or does she truly not understand?

Whatever the root, the tree that grows from it is silence, and fear grows in silence. 

Cassian has lived in fear many times of his life.  He knows how to bear it, and bear it he will, without a flicker, for the rebellion, for her. 

He does not know how to see it borne by someone he loves.

“Do you even know why I love you?” he asks her one day.  They’re sitting in the maintenance bay sorting ratchets and small-droid wheel cogs.  It’s a stupid, random moment to choose, he knows, and an awful opener, and with most people the bluntness would provoke hurt; but Jyn is hurt by entirely other things.  She’s always been more at ease with directness.  She actually grins for a second as she says

“To be honest, no.”

“Ah, Jyn…” At least she accepts the word _love_ without disbelief.  

“I know why ** _I_** love _you_ ,” she tells him. “But as for what you see in me - I’m not much to have, Cassian.”

Is that the crux of it, then? – a worthlessness of self to match with his own?  That brings another kind of pain; but she’s talking, he’s talking, it’s a start. “Not much?  You are so much more than I ever had or thought to have in my life.”

“Tell me then,” she says, setting aside a handful of assorted chassis bolts.  Almost crossly, almost shyly.  “Go on.” 

She knows he’s trying to have a conversation and she’s ordering him to proceed.  His Jyn, furious as a nail-gun and with a folktale’s quick kindness and courage. 

Cassian has had to be eloquent, when the need arose.  He’s even had training in it; public speaking, delivering reports, convincing potential recruits.  How to use words, tell truths, make the tale sing. But that was a tale of the galaxy and its freedom, not the small inconsequential one of his inward self.  

Well, he started it; he asked for this and she’s given him the go ahead.  Only - how can he ever tell her the enormity of this truth?  Why do I love you? – it’s all his life, and he has no idea how to - 

Ugh.  He really should have planned this better.

“Oh Jyn.  Jyn.” He’s found a short-range comm antenna in the case they’ve been sorting through.  He turns it over in his hands, feeling the rough edge where it was ripped out of its droid’s body.  Wondering whether it hurt.  He takes a deep breath. “You are everything I’ve always known I could never deserve.  You never gave up, even when you thought everything was lost you still didn’t, you held on, you kept your head down and stayed quiet and you just _refused._  You found something hidden deep to keep you alive.  Parts of me had got hidden too, I thought they had died in the darkness inside me, and you were like daylight and rainfall, all that life in you, like need, like fire.”

“You were all this to me, too,” she says very softly. 

“And then,” because he has to go on now, cannot let himself look at the twin enormity of what she just said, not yet, or he’ll never get this out; and he wishes so much now that he’d prepared a speech, because the way he’s talking sounds rambling and slightly obsessive, but “Even when you told yourself your father was better off dead and you were better off for thinking him so, for almost fifteen years, the moment you knew he was alive you took it like a punch, rolled with it, you didn’t fight it.  You knew you had to find him and find the truth of him.  It’s like – you always accept the reality and yet you never stop fighting it, too.  Even when we were at the waterline and only seconds from death you didn’t give up.”

“Nor did you,” Jyn says. “You never gave up.  You came back, you _came back_ …”

“When I couldn’t move anymore, you dragged me.  I think you’ll never give up while your heart is beating.  You’re life, Jyn, and you’ve brought life everywhere you’ve gone.”

“No.  No, that’s nonsense, that’s – I don’t -  I’ve brought so much death, Cassian, I –“

“But so have I.  In the end we all do that.  We’re soldiers, we carry our own deaths on our back from the day we first take up a weapon.  I’m an assassin, a spy, I’ve ended so many lives; you gave me back mine.  I owe my heart’s blood in recompense so many times; you gave me the chance to put the meaning of all that back where it belonged, at the heart, the chance to accept the horror of it.  I still struggle to believe you stayed with me.  Am I making sense?  You saved me, Jyn.” 

“As you did me.”

As he did her. 

He twists the little broken antenna.  It should be possible to clean up the severed end and re-wire it, give an MSE somewhere back its voice. 

“I wish we felt more certain of one another,” Jyn says. “I know in my mind, but sometimes my feelings – it feels like they’re being _told_ the truth but they haven’t lived in it enough yet.”

“I know.  Force alive, I know.” Yes, between them, they’re finding the words to explore this. “It doesn’t seem quite real yet, and so it doesn’t seem possible.”

“Like a dream.  You might wake up and leave me in it.  Alone again.”

But she wraps her arms round him even as she says that, and they sit for a moment just holding one another, giving the lie to that thought. 

“I do know you won’t leave me,” Jyn says.

“I do know you’re staying,” he says.

Hope and life, that they live in, little by little, in pledged days, in small acts of small love.  Hope and life, that are, that will always be, stronger than fear and death.  He believes.  He knows.


End file.
